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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> Public schools are often filled with petty tyrants.

If you think that's only public school you're deluding yourself. My secondary education was in private schools (in the US sense of the word) and I have no issue whatsoever seeing this scenario unroll there (I can even cast the parts).

Petty tyrants is what you get when petty people get access to any sort of power to lord over others, the exact nature of that power has little relevance. The concentration of petty tyrants is only a function of how easy it is to be granted power by the environment.

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Maybe spacemanmatt didn't want to disparage institutions he had no experience with.

If I thought it was only public schools I would have said only public schools.

When you add artificial specificity, people assume you did so for a reason. Like if you say "women are [X descriptive property]" people will assume, rightfully, an implied "women, as opposed to men, are ..."

And of course when I say "when you add artificial specitivity," there is an implied "when you, or anyone else, adds artificial specitivity," totally contradicting the rule. This is English, not Aristotelian logic.

picky, picky

The difference with private schools is the parents have a lot more clout, since they're paying the bills.

Everything below is just my experience of it (anecdotal) and nothing more but

As far as I've seen parents have way more clout in public schools not only do they also pay the bills (via taxes) but public schools are part of the wider political systems (local politicians, local PTA equivalent) through which parents can reach the school and its administration with consequences.

While parents do pay the bill in private schools said schools tend to consider the right to pay them a privilege (for the parents/pupil) and act accordingly with respect to complaints. And parents paying the school directly tend to dislike "seeing their investment wasted".

That wasn't my experience at all. Where I grew up the teachers union controlled the school board. There really wasn't any counterbalance - the union was willing to finance candidates and nobody else was, so at most you would have one or two outsiders on a board comprised of people who put the bureaucracy before the parents. If your child was being treated badly you basically had no recourse unless enough other children were receiving the same treatment that it became a political issue. I can't remember a political issue that ever resulted in someone losing his job. Most people just don't care who's on the school board because they don't have kids in school.

The private schools were different because the parents knew each other. If something bad was happening word spread quickly, and parents who were paying thousands of dollars to provide their kids a better experience than public schools would yank them in a heartbeat if it looked like their money was wasted.

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